(Excerpt from Motherfucking Monday by Mark Manson 2 Mar 2020)
A new academic study published last week looked at why the lottery makes people happy, despite the fact they’re essentially setting their money on fire.
The study is interesting because apparently, it’s not the winning that made people happier. What made people happier was the expectation leading up to the drawing.
Put simply: people enjoyed thinking they might win but not actually knowing, more than they enjoyed the winning itself. It was the uncertainty that made them happy, not the result. And as soon as the drawing was over and that uncertainty disappeared, their happiness also disappeared, and they needed to buy another lottery ticket to achieve the same high.
I’ve written before about how we often enjoy wanting something far more than actually having it. In the case of the lottery, people probably buy tickets telling themselves that they want to be rich. But really what they want is the idea that they could be special. They desire to feel as though they are the “chosen one”: the fantasy that out of tens of millions of people picked numbers, *I* was the one who got it right. This is why people cough up money every week. Not just for the promise of riches, but to be able to feel, just for a few days, that they have been chosen by the Gods.